Trump asks the crowd to name ‘that peace prize,’ then calls it the Pulitzer

Donald Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize so badly he can’t remember what it’s called.

Wednesday night at Clemson, partway through his list of the wars he says he settled, he got to the injustice: “they gave the wonderful Peace Prize, right? Does anybody know the name of that Peace Prize? The Peace Prize?” Then he answered his own question: “They gave the Pulitzer Prize to a young lady ... a young lady who nobody ever heard of.” In the same breath he listed “the Congo and Rwanda” among the wars he settled.

The young lady he appears to mean is Navi Pillay, 85, from Durban, who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, not a Pulitzer. Nobody ever heard of her, apart from Nelson Mandela, whom she defended, and the Rwanda war-crimes tribunal and the International Criminal Court, where she sat as a judge, and the UN, where she ran human rights. So the man who says he settled Rwanda is sniffing at the woman who judged its genocide.

About two minutes later he circled back: “I didn’t get the Nobel Prize. I didn’t get the Pulitzer. I should have gotten the Pulitzer for writing, too.” The reporters who did win one, he said, won it for “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and “They all had it wrong.” So that’s the Nobel he didn’t get, the Pulitzer he didn’t get, and the Pulitzer he just handed a Nobel laureate. Even his grudges need a fact-checker.